Annually, fires are responsible for extensive property damage and loss of life. Various fire detection systems have been employed in an attempt to reduce the extent of property damage and the likelihood of loss of life.
Residential buildings are often equipped with fire detectors that use one type of sensing method to detect for the presence of fire. For example, a smoke detector employing an ionization sensor may trigger an alarm if the sensor detects an increase in the density of air borne particulate matter. Ionisation sensors are known to have a high rate of false positive readings in the presence of dust and cooking vapours in particular. As a result, smoke detectors of this type are often disabled, thereby increasing the risk of property damage and loss of life.
Some fire detector systems, such as described in Weimeyer (U.S. Pat. No. 5,726,633), employ two sensors and as such two sensory inputs to detect for the presence of fire. However, these systems often employ complex algorithms (such as fuzzy logic) and microprocessor technology to process the sensory inputs to determine when an alarm condition has occurred. As a result, solutions of this type are often unnecessarily complex and expensive for sensing fire in residential settings.
There remains a need for a simple, low cost system, method and apparatus for detecting fire and the products of combustion.